Control of an Energy Regenerative Mechatronic Damper

This paper presents the development of a power electronics controller for a proof-of-concept energy regenerative damper in vehicular applications. The damper consists of an efficient motion conversion mechanism to convert translational base vibration into reciprocating rotary motion, a brushless three-phase permanent magnet rotary machine, and a threephase power converter. A power electronics boost controller is developed to capture the generated electrical power and store it into a battery which allows overcoming kinematic nonlinearities in the motion conversion stage. To this end, a sliding mode controller is presented that can enforce a resistive behavior across the terminals of the rotary machine by regulating the converter’s input current in real-time.

Through the proposed approach, the mechanical damping coefficient of the system can be controlled, on-demand, with an energy regenerative function. The performance of the developed system is evaluated under sinusoidal excitation inputs and transient conditions when operating with a damping coefficient of 650N:s=m synthesized through power electronicsand control. Experimental results are presented that evaluate performance of the proposed energyregenerative damper.